


Seven

by IndigoRiot



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Drabbles, Other, Snapfic, Snapshots, Solas Being Solas, after uthenera, before the breach, the untold moments
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 22:23:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16819630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IndigoRiot/pseuds/IndigoRiot
Summary: No matter. The deed was done. Whatever clarity hindsight might bring, the past was immutable and unchangeable, Solas had to accept that. The future, however, might yet be shaped anew.That was where things could change.That was where he could put things right.*A series of drabbles detailing Solas' journey from the moment of his awakening to the day the veil ruptured and his plans to retrieve the orb spiraled out of his control.





	Seven

**First Breaths**

When at long last Solas stirred, it was with the lingering memory of a roaring battlefield. Flashing swords pierced the edges of his periphery and a piercing shriek haunted the skies.

Then the image shifted.

He first saw mounds of filth, flesh and bone on the bloodied field at Ostsgar, and then ash choking screams in the streets of Halamshiral. Blood ran down the steps of Mythal’s temple, he felt it pool about his feet. Red tainted the rivers and the seas. Chiselled paths of Minrathous were blackened from a pyre while elsewhere a mountain crumbled, turning a metropolis into a morgue. The splendid crystal spires of Arlathan turned dark and all the singers ceased their songs. Sacrifice and loss and blood unending; every massacre of every age.

They say the healer has the bloodiest hands. Would they also have said the same of _his_ , then, dripping with the blood of millennia?

Warm and slick and sickening; a dagger in his hands. Red pouring from the back of a friend. Betrayal met with more of the same - was there nothing worth preserving in this broken world of his? Solas tried not to imagine the look in Felassan’s eyes as he fell, tried to ignore the sound of his body hitting the ground. It echoed between his ears regardless, amplified by the fickle energies of the fade, a tolling knell to accompany the kill, a once vibrant light gone dark. He tried to ignore the sight of the one so loyal he’d named himself for a tale of the wolf, slumped on the ground at his feet - silent, unmoving, unliving.

It was necessary, he told himself. A sacrifice preferable to every other alternative.

But this world was broken now - split in two - and its residents mere phantoms. Shadows of the People who muddied their faces with pride and played pretend in the forests while human quicklings played lord and master over their freed cousins in the cities. Both succumbed to the passing of time.

No matter. The deed was done. Whatever clarity hindsight might bring, the past was immutable and unchangeable, Solas had to accept that. The future, however, might yet be shaped anew.

That was where things could change.

That was where he could put things right.

* *

A dark and ancient room appeared before eyes that were more ancient still. Illustrious frescoes, dimly lit by the soft, predawn light filtering in through tinted windows adorned the walls; their colours were still deep and warm and bright. Glistening mosaics and smooth marble steps - strong and proud - existed yet, almost untouched by the passing of ages and devastation of time. Almost.

Lying in this hall, it was not so hard to imagine that everything was as it once was. That nothing had been sundered yet. That there might still be another way. That the sanctuary might, with the rising of the sun, begin to rise itself. That the People he had gathered might begin about their business lighting the torches, delivering reports, preparing the meals, readying the battle-plans, tending to the injured, rallying the refugees. But it had been so long since this hall had seen such activity. The Sanctuary of Fen’Harel was empty and dead. The People had abandoned him, but... had he not abandoned them first? A sad and sorry sight, to see how far they had both fallen as a result.

Out of nowhere, there grew a ringing in Solas’ ears - high pitched and insistent. An alarum bell? A call for aid, or to arms? And from where? Then just as suddenly, the room began to swim before his eyes, the mosaics and frescoes distorted and blending into a cacophony of colour, a disturbing disarray. Soon, patches of his vision disappeared entirely. And the pressure, the unbearable pressure of pounding behind the ears, behind the eyes, pushing against his throat and punching through his chest and piercing through his lungs that - oh.

_Oh_.

Solas drew a great, shuddering breath just as the convulsions began.

He’d forgotten this need.

By degrees, he remembered how his body should work again. A breath raked in through the lungs, though it felt at first like sandpaper, began to erase the pressure in his chest and erase black spots in his vision. Opening and closing his eyelids - blinking, he reminded himself - moistened the eyes. Eventually, the ringing in his ears subsided, though the walls continued to sway a little.

The ancient elf pulled himself upright and groaned. Even a movement as small as this - the simple act of sitting up - left him feeling drained. His body felt like lead. He was too heavy, and it had little to do with his robes caked thick with dust or the centuries upon centuries long growth of his hair hanging in unkempt, matted locks behind his back. This heaviness was in his very skin and bones. It was in his soul. The separation from the fade weighed heavily upon him after a lifetime lived within.

It was no easy task, rising to his feet. Solas swayed, and stumbled, and fell, only to pick himself up again and rise once more. This was not the first time he had found himself alone and on his knees. He had a feeling it would not be the last.

With the gathering light of day, Solas walked between the sun and the shadows, setting his sanctuary to rights. Or, rather, trying to. Lighting the veilfire torches alone was an exhausting effort. The fade’s essence eluded him. Instead of flowing to his fingertips like water through a stream, it resisted. Trying to work magic felt like pulling tar through a sieve.

After the chambers were lit his hands shook with the effort it had taken, and oh how he resented it. He had grown so weak.

Later, Solas found that the sanctuary’s spirit guardians did not respond to his call at all. He threw flames at the runes which held them in slumber, such was the depth of his frustration, but succeeded in producing little else but sparks. For a time after he simply sat alone and lamented the loss of everything he was. Everything they all were. The loss of his kin. The loss of his last friend in the waking realm. Most crippling of all, the loss of all his hope for waking to a better world.

* *

It some time before Solas accepted the fact that he would have to leave.

* *

Solas spent the midday hours skulking around the sanctuary’s armoury for an acceptable staff through which to channel his magic. Eventually, he came across a rather handsomely carved stave of bleached cedarwood inlaid with veridium and bearing a large, swirling, emerald focus. A gift, if memory served correct, from a local craftsman for saving the life of his eldest son who was selected for the Hunt by Andruil herself. The staff’s beauty, however, could not negate his grief over the necessity of its use, nor the fury.

Another hour or two of the afternoon was devoted to meditation and practice, cleansing the staff of residue mana and attuning its focus to him. Getting familiar with using a staff to reach into the fade was not something he could ever remember having to do before and, although he had expected to awaken fatigued, the extent of his weakness remained frustrating beyond words. Fire continued to evade him, and he had not the energy nor the desire to pull lightening through the veil, yet once he’d found a place of cool acceptance some time later, frost magic came easily enough. The expansive armoury and all its instruments of war were awash with winter’s pale, glittering touch by the time he was satisfied.

As the sun began its slow descent towards the horizon once again, Solas drifted between the dusty tomes of his library, footsteps echoing through the empty rows. Knowledge of ages, lost to time. Botanical archives from before the fall, herb-lore and recipes for far more than the mere calming of illness and ailment. He found tomes detailing the journeys of the stars, rare alignments of which gave birth to subtle energies that allowed runecraft and spellcasting an edge in beauty and in battle. There were books instructing how to bottle starlight, weave with the flames of the sun, tread the depths of the ocean. Atop the dusty shelves were other books of a different description, too - pages dedicated to music, to art and architecture and adventures through every corner of their known world. The corners of Solas’ mouth twitched slightly as he stumbled across the journal of an elf who had walked among the dwarves and found them to be exactly as obstinate as the Stone for whom they were named; it was of no academic value, of course, but it was an interesting read nonetheless - one of his personal favourites among the anecdotal volumes. More than this, though, Solas found sheaves of living memory, shimmering veilfire runes that depicted the lives and deaths of his kin.

Solas wondered at the possibility of restoring the People who yet lingered. He thought of the descendants of mighty Elvhenan herded behind stone walls, downtrodden, disregarded. How might their faces and spirits might lift at the chance for restoration? But, Solas thought, the majority do not even guess at what had been taken from them.

He thought upon the Dalish, too - children lost in the woods who yearned for a past that never existed, mourned for a kingdom that was never stolen, strove towards regaining a home that would never have been theirs. For centuries he had watched them from the corners the Fade as they told fragments of stories only half-remembered. They cursed his name and set crude effigies of a wolf outside their dismal camps to scare off evil spirits - for what does evil fear but something more sinister than itself? They told tales of him to frighten little children into good behaviour, invoked his name to chase away the enemies they made.

Fen’Harel: Roamer of the Beyond; He Who Hunts Alone; The Lord of Tricksters; The Bringer of Nightmares; The Dread Wolf.

Solas shook his head.

The Dalish would sooner guzzle poison than accept anything he had to offer.

* *

Night fell, and Solas found himself full of restless energy despite the fatigue of his day. To his annoyance, he was completely unable to enter the Fade. Sleep came, but it was black and blinding. There was a long and hard task ahead and he was in want of wisdom’s counsel to temper his steps, yet it seemed he must do without.

The first of his issues to settle must be to regain his control over the Eluvian network. Felassan, in his folly, had allowed himself to dally with the phantoms of this world for far too long and thus threatened all Solas had orchestrated from his slumber in the Fade. He had other agents, of course, other pieces of the puzzle he called a plan, but none to whom he had trusted with the Eluvians. Perhaps, then, the folly was Solas’ own. It would not be the first time he had placed his trust in the wrong person.

His next order of business must be to secure eyes on the Magister he’d lead to the orb. Solas knew little of the mage from Tevinter save for a large - and largely secret - following of men who spoke of him in hushed and reverent tones. If anyone could amass the arcane power necessary to unlock the power of his orb it was a Tevinter mage, particularly since their magic held many stolen parallels with the magic of the ancient Elvhen.

After that, Solas had few misgivings about what would happen next. The Magister would be consumed, or destroyed, by the power within the orb and Solas would step-in from his place in the shadows to regain control.

And then the final step. Nothing else remained which held greater importance than this: to right the consequences of his mistake and seek to heal this fallen world. Nothing else mattered now.

Solas must be resolved, singular and sincere in his purpose.

* *

It was not long before Solas came across the first of a number things to test his resolve: Felassan’s body sprawled at the foot of an Eluvian in the atrium... real, physical, and cold.

The atrium was a sheltered courtyard at the centre of the sanctuary. It was overhung with trees and sprawling vines, a warm rush of amber and green he’d designed to distract from the threat of war. This place was a hive of activity bustling with soldiers and rescued slaves alike in its time. Each mirror along the perimeter once held a luminescent blue glow as his agents tried to turn the hostilities in his favour. Now, the courtyard was empty even of its ghosts and all the mirrors stood dark and dead, save for one.

Leaning somewhat heavily on his staff, Solas crouched down beside the one he had called friend, lying beneath the dappled light of the Eluvian. There was no sign of struggle, no pained lines on his brow nor pool of blood from a dagger in the Fade. He lay before the mirror, one arm stretched out into its transient depths, looking so peaceful he might even have been sleeping.

He _was_ sleeping.

Now, he simply was not anything at all. Just a husk of a once shimmering soul.

Why had he come here and not remained back in Orlais as he should? Why would Felassan physically journey across Thedas to come _here_ when every previous meeting had been held in the corners of the fade? Had he thought Solas would wake today, and so he came to greet him in person?

From the corner of his eye, Solas caught a glint of light - the Eluvian’s dappled glow reflecting off a torn and folded leaf of parchment. His curiosity peaked, Solas carefully lifted the paper and saw Felassan’s elegant veilfire script. His letters were still formed with the same extravagant flourish he remembered from their youth, with looping ‘j’s and a gracefully superfluous swipe across every ‘f’ and ‘t’. Solas pushed away a sudden pang of nostalgia and began to read.

_“Solas,_

_If you are awake and reading these words then it means I am no longer awake to speak them to you myself. Pray, pay attention, for they will be my last to you - indeed, to anyone._

_First of all, you are quite literally a back-stabbing son-of-a-bitch. You know that, right? After everything I’ve done for you, for us all..._

_Secondly, I jest. And, perhaps more importantly... I forgive you. Months have I known it would come to this, yet I find I cannot resent you. I’ve always admired your steadfastness and perseverance. I would swear to no other._

_I am... sorry, it had to turn out this way. Truly. It is unfortunate - but unfortunate things have always happened to us, haven’t they, my friend? Oh, the luck we share..._

_This world is much changed and we both knew it would be. Its reality is stubborn and unkind, its people cruel, its magic all but banished. Without the greatest threat of war, men make war upon themselves. The weakest remain prey to those with the strength and will to stand taller than the rest. It has always been such. All the wickedness you have seen through the veil of Dreaming, I have seen enacted before my very eyes._

_I have watched children cast out into the wilds by their kin for fear of magic. I have heard the screams of men and women crushed to breaking point by the Templar’s iron fists, and seen as rage and despair overcomes them. I have known entire families burned for fear of rebellion, weeping mothers and tiny babes turned to ash. There is so much malice in the hearts of men, Solas, and there are days it seems this world both reaps and sows in sorrow alone._

_But that is merely one page of this world’s story. The others are littered with wonders I can scarcely describe. Among them, stories of bravery and fortitude, of mercy and patience and love made real. More than these things, however, is hope._

_Hope lingers on, Solas._

_I beg you, my friend, walk this world. Leaf through its pages, listen to the words of its story, lets its cadence carry you through. On the steps of Arlathan I swore my life to you and the future you saw for our people, yet for this world I shall gladly give my death._

_Pray, do this one last favour for me, lethallin. Walk the world. Give hope some room to grow. There are some things, old friend, that cannot rise from ashes._

_I remain your most devoted,_

_Felassan.”_

“You sentimental old fool,” Solas murmured, his voice a cracked and painful whisper after several ages of disuse. He buckled beneath a wave of grief anew, and wept.

* *

It was a long time before Solas stood to his feet. Longer still before he resolved himself to leave.

Solas felt as though he had been reduced to little more than a puppet, the will of a greater man than he pulling the strings as he dragged Felassan’s body back through the Eluvian and lay him atop the pyre. Absently, it occurred to him just why Felassan made the journey to the sanctuary. Without the passphrase, Solas would have been stranded if not for Felassan’s arm through the frame, holding the way open for him.

Here in the crossroads, there was no way for Solas to tell how time passed. No sun by which to track the passing of the day nor moon at night. How long had he stood watching the flames lift Felassan’s ashes into the opalescent skies? How long was long enough?

Again, as though someone pulled his strings anew, Solas felt his legs carry him away. Back through the floating paths of the crossroads, a place neither physical nor Fade. Back through paths that circles around fractured fragments of his fallen world. Back towards the fell, farce of a world of his own making.

Solas found the final Eluvian that would take him out into Thedas.

Through it, he stepped.

Alone.


End file.
